Cory Booker Says He’d Push Clemency for Non-Violent Drug Offenders

(Bloomberg) -- Senator Cory Booker said he would consider clemency for an estimated 17,000 non-violent drug offenders if elected president, in a bid to appeal to minority and liberal voters as he tries to gain traction among a crowded field of Democratic contenders.

“The War on Drugs has been a war on people, tearing families apart, ruining lives, and disproportionately affecting people of color and low-income individuals -- all without making us safer,” Booker, of New Jersey, said in a statement Thursday. “Granting clemency won’t repair all the damage that has been done by the War on Drugs and our broken criminal justice system, but it will help our country confront this injustice and begin to heal.”

The proposal would immediately consider clemency for marijuana offenders, those whose sentences would be reduced under a sentencing overhaul enacted last year and those facing lengthier prison terms because of the sentencing disparity between crack and powdered cocaine.

Booker, who served as mayor of Newark, New Jersey, before being elected to the Senate, has made issues of justice central to his campaign. He helped craft a bipartisan compromise that led to the largest overhaul of federal sentencing laws in a generation, which President Donald Trump signed into law in December.

On Wednesday, he demanded that former Vice President Joe Biden -- the party’s presidential front-runner -- ask forgiveness for saying that he was able to work with segregationists in an atmosphere of “civility” in the U.S. Senate more than four decades ago. Biden refused and accused Booker "knows better" that to criticize his civil right record.

Viewed as a rising star in Democratic politics when he was elected to the senate in a 2013 special election, Booker’s presidential campaign has struggled to break out of the field of 23 Democrats vying for the party’s presidential nomination.

He placed seventh with the support of 2% of Democrats in a nationwide Economist/YouGov survey released last week. In South Carolina, where a majority of the Democratic electorate is black, Booker is in fifth place, according to a Post and Courier poll released Sunday.

To contact the reporter on this story: Terrence Dopp in Washington at tdopp@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kasia Klimasinska at kklimasinska@bloomberg.net, Elizabeth Wasserman, Kathleen Hunter

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